Posted on 12/14/2006 7:40:54 AM PST by Alex Murphy
Picture the following scenario. Crowds of Americans rioting in the streets. Two opposing groups shout loudly, vying to have their messages heard and heeded. The groups meet. Confrontation ensues. Fistfights break out. Church windows are smashed. What are these rioters fighting about? Christmas. One group favors celebrating Christmas, the other opposes all Christmas observances. This isn’t an imaginary event, it is history. It happened in Boston on Christmas day in 1706.
In America's increasing love-affair with Christmas (both the Christian and commercial versions), we have forgotten that there was a time when much of European and American Christianity thought that Christmas should not be celebrated. In the riot described previously, the anti-Christmas group consisted largely of Congregationalists (Puritan descendants), Baptists, and Presbyterians, while the pro-Christmas group comprised mostly Anglicans (Episcopalians). The notion that Christians of any stripe should not want to celebrate Christmas is so foreign to our present concept of the holiday, that we need to review some history to understand it.
Prior to the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, Roman Catholicism celebrated the "Christ Mass." It was one of many special masses and feasts of the Catholic Church celebrating key events in Jesus' life or the birthdays of saints. The three main Protestant movements that ultimately came to America had three different reactions to this situation.
First, although the Anglican Church developed a Protestant theology, it kept much of Catholic liturgy, including festivals celebrating aspects of Christ's life and the feast days of many saints. It gave special emphasis to the celebration of Christmas.
Second, after Martin Luther nailed his "95 Theses" to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, special liturgical observances began to be frowned upon. The Lutherans thought that the celebrations of saints’ days were too much and so cancelled them. But they still emphasized observing events in Jesus' life, and so continued with joyous Christmas festivities.
Third, the Calvinists in Switzerland banned all Christian holy days not mentioned in Scripture. That approach meant that the Sabbath was acceptable, but nothing else. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and other celebrations were to be treated as normal days with nothing special about them.
The Calvinist position came to be quite influential in Great Britain, even though it never altered the position of the Anglican Church. John Knox brought Calvinism to Scotland as Presbyterianism where Christmas was banned in 1583, while the Puritans brought Calvinism into England, where it became influential in circles both within and outside of the Anglican Church. During the Civil War in 1647, Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan followers outlawed Christmas observance. It was brought back in 1660 at the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.
From England, both sides brought their Christmas beliefs to America. The Puritans (later becoming the Congregationalists) were joined by Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists (despite their founders' pro-Christmas predilections), and Baptists on the anti-Christmas side, while the Anglicans dominated the pro-Christmas side, and were later joined by the Lutherans and the Dutch Reformed.
In Boston, the Puritans outlawed Christmas in 1659. Although the ban was lifted in 1681 when the British government took control of the colony, an armed guard had to protect the governor on his way to church on Christmas of 1686. When the colony reverted to local control in 1689, Christmas again fell out of favor.
The objection to Christmas by Americans was two-fold. First, for Calvinist theology, it reflected the pagan character of Catholic worship. Christmas was not a biblical holiday and had not even become a Christian festival before the late 300s; it was a creation of the church, not of Christ. Second, the holiday was accompanied by extensive reveling. Celebrations were not primarily worshipful, but involved feasting, game playing, heavy drinking, shooting, and gambling. For the over-indulgers, it brought out the worst of their excesses. Since the holiday celebrated the Savior's birth, such immoral behavior was seen as sacrilegious.
During the 18th century, Christmas observance began to be more accepted. Church-goers turned their attention to purifying the holiday of its excesses, rather than rejecting it altogether. By the 1750s, even New England hymn books contained Christmas carols. By the early 1800s, Christmas was observed with an emphasis on family and children.
In 1836, Alabama became the first state to make Christmas a legal holiday. Other states followed suit; even Massachusetts legalized Christmas in 1856, almost 200 years after its ban. But the last state, Oklahoma, did not join in until 1907. So next Christmas, 2007, will be the centenary of Christmas being the first religious holiday whose celebration across the United States is sanctioned by law.
Dutch Catholics came up with the idea of a make-believe St. Nicolas who arrived by barge in Holland's canals, before riding a white horse to distribute gifts to those who deserved them.'It was part of a counter-Reformation movement, to the consternation of Calvinists,' Grom said.
Interesting.....
ping ...
Thanks for posting this; interesting reading.
I hope others will read it too, specifically those who think it is somehow unAmerican for commercial establishments not to "extensively revel" in Christmas. Some people speak as if they worship in a store, not a church.
(Flame away - I'll be at work, and then at a Christmas party for the next several hours.)
Aren't the direct descendants of the original Puritans the Congregationalists and the Unitarians? I suspect the cultural elite has largely remained the same. Though their theology has changed, their hostility to historical Christianity might not have.
I think a lot of practicing Christians have the same ambivalence towards Christmas today. Celebrating Jesus' birthday is great, but I personally have real problems with the commercialization and secularization of the holiday. I don't care if I get the latest model Mercedes for Christmas, and in fact I don't care if I don't get anything at all.
Other than going to church celebrations/activities and doing volunteer activities to help the needy, I pretty much boycott all the Christmas hoopla.
Do Calvinists gather for communal worship on the Sabbath?
At one point Calvin considered moving worship from Sunday to a weekday.
And part of that is due to the myth that the word "Christmas" comes from the celebration of the Mass, thus "Christ + mass". However, this is absolutely false.
When pressed Catholic theologians admit that the origin of the word "mass" comes from the Latin word "missio" when the congregants were dismissed [dismissio] at its conclusion. It is the root of our word "mission" and "missionary".
The word "Christmas" is from the Latin means: "Christos + missio" or literally the day of "Christ's sending" or the day "Christ was sent" into the midst of his people.
Going back even farther, the word "Christmas" [Christos + mesos] would be found in those Greek churches, manuscripts and communities that spoke of "Christos mesos" or "Christ in the midst" of his people, or "Christ the mediator" between God and man.
And even further back, the Greek Jews would have used the term "Christos matsa" [Christ's coming forth] to identify the day of the fulfillment of Micah 5:2 and Daniel 9:25 with regard to the day of the "coming forth of the Messiah". That day to the early Jewish Christians was celebrated on Channukah.
So here would be three separate languages with a common understanding of the word "Christmas" and what it means: the day of Christ's coming forth [Hebrew: matsa], or being sent [Latin: missio] into the midst [Greek: mesos] of his people.
I hope that helps clear things up not only for those who go to mass but also for those who don't.
CC&E
It will for some.....others will continue to wallow in their traditions.
"INCOMING"!
Excellent. Now that they have been "pressed" they agree with the historical meaning of the word. What else would they think it meant? From the 1917 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia:
The word Mass (missa) first established itself as the general designation for the Eucharistic Sacrifice in the West after the time of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), the early Church having used the expression the "breaking of bread" (fractio panis) or "liturgy" (Acts 13:2, leitourgountes); the Greek Church has employed the latter name for almost sixteen centuries. There were current in the early days of Christianity other terms;
"The Lord's Supper" (coena dominica),
the "Sacrifice" (prosphora, oblatio),
"the gathering together" (synaxis, congregatio),
"the Mysteries", and
(since Augustine), "the Sacrament of the Altar".
-snip-
Etymologically, the word missa is neither (as Baronius states) from a Hebrew word, nor from the Greek mysis, but is simply derived from missio, just as oblata is derived from oblatio, collecta from collectio, and ulta from ultio. The reference was however not to a Divine "mission", but simply to a "dismissal" (dimissio) as was also customary in the Greek rite (cf. "Canon. Apost.", VIII, xv: apolyesthe en eirene), and as is still echoed in the phrase Ite missa est. This solemn form of leave-taking was not introduced by the Church as something new, but was adopted from the ordinary language of the day, as is shown by Bishop Avitus of Vienne as late as A.D. 500 (Ep. 1 in P.L., LIX, 199):
In churches and in the emperor's or the prefect's courts, Missa est is said when the people are released from attendance.
In the sense of "dismissal", or rather "close of prayer", missa is used in the celebrated "Peregrinatio Silvae" at least seventy times (Corpus scriptor. eccles. latinor., XXXVIII, 366 sq.) and Rule of St. Benedict places after Hours, Vespers, Compline, the regular formula: Et missae fiant (prayers are ended). Popular speech gradually applied the ritual of dismissal, as it was expressed in both the Mass of the Catechumens and the Mass of the Faithful, by synecdoche to the entire Eucharistic Sacrifice, the whole being named after the part.
Count on this scenario repeating more and more as Muslims infiltrate our country.
Rewriting history.
The majority of Christians celebrated Christmas, including Catholics and Lutherans.
Smaller calvinistic and Puritan sects did not, since they rejected "popery" but they were never "many" in Europe. They were so unpopular in England that they immigrated to the USA in large numbers, mainly to New England. As more non Puritans immigrated, (starting with German Lutherans and then Irish Catholic) Christmas became larger.
So I guess Ebenezer Scrooge was a Calvinist.
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